Egg freezing
Egg freezing, also known as the oocyte preservation is a method of woman’s fertility preservation that allows women to postpone their motherhood and increase their chances to get pregnant in the future when the time comes.
The woman’s chances to get pregnant decrease as they get older but the exact age when woman stops producing quality eggs varies. Egg freezing is now considered as one of the breakthrough methods of woman’s fertility preservations and includes ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval and freezing.
The egg freezing journey starts with your first visit to the doctor who will assess your ovarian reserve, test your hormone levels, evaluate your fertility and general health. Your doctor will prepare you for the start of the ovarian stimulation. This process takes up to two weeks and involves daily hormone injections that induce the maturation of multiple follicles at the same time. During that time, you need to visit your doctor for vaginal ultrasounds and the measurement of hormone levels to see your response to medication. At the day 10-12 of the stimulation, when the follicles are ready for the retrieval the woman does her last trigger injection to reach the final maturation of eggs and 36 hours after that she comes for her egg collection. This is a surgical procedure which is done under sedative medication and takes up to 20 minutes. While you are asleep, the doctor under the ultrasound guidance advances the thin needle to each follicle and aspirates the fluid and the egg to the test tubes.
After that, embryologists take these test tubes and under the microscope identify mature eggs, prepare them for the freezing your eggs and then freeze them all until the woman decides to use them in the future. The vitrification technique is used to cryopreserve the biological material and allows your eggs to get frozen very quickly without damaging them. Once the egg retrieval is over, you wake up and spend a few hours under the doctor’s control and then you are free to leave the clinic.